How Georgian Democracy Died Right Under Our Noses
- Zoë Taylor
- May 28
- 11 min read
If you were to scroll through all the BBC News Online articles in their ‘Georgia’ category since the beginning of the year, you would find a curious collection: Orthodox Christians celebrating Christmas in early January, an obituary for the sculptor Zurab Ts’ereteli, and a Radio 4 podcast on traditional polyphonic music. These kinds of stories, taken on their own, paint a picture of a culturally rich, if slightly obscure, politically unremarkable country on the edge of the European continent, yet this could not be further from the truth.
In today’s Georgia, there has been over half a year of continuous nightly protests, often treated violently by the authorities. Opposition leaders and journalists are arrested, elections are unfree and unfair, and even the presidency is disputed. The ruling party seems more authoritarian by the day, as its reclusive billionaire leader drags a once-democratic country increasingly towards authoritarianism and a close relationship with Putin. Essentially, the country has been in a protracted crisis for a while now. For me, at least, when I see news outlets like the BBC post a story consisting of a series of photos of the Orthodox Christmas, with Georgians tacked on the end almost as an afterthought, just two days after Nik’a Gvaramia, the co-leader of the opposition group ‘Coalition for Change’ was arrested and assaulted by police (a story that went unreported), it makes me feel, at the very least, a little angry.
Of course, this initial presentation is a little hyperbolic. There have been some excellent examples of journalism this year in many news organisations including the BBC, which have published stories about Georgian politics, including Rayhan Demytrie’s profile on Bidzina Ivanishvili (the aforementioned billionaire) and accompanying World Service podcast, and Paul Kirby’s account of the assault of another opposition leader, Giorgi Gakharia, which did very briefly mention the earlier attack on Gvaramia. While these are not exceptions per se, the coverage is not consistent nor is it strong enough to make your average citizen aware of the political situation at all. I think, ultimately, this is a real shame. At a time where liberal democratic values are being tested all over the world, it is far more important than ever to pay close attention to the places where these battles are being fought. If the journalists don’t help the public care, then the governments have no strong incentive to stop ignoring Georgia. Their neglect has already had dire consequences.
Georgian Dream and the 2024 Elections - What Has Been out of Sight.
But first, some recent context. The ruling party of Georgia is, and has been since 2012, Georgian Dream (colloquially known as the ‘Kotsebi’ based on a portmanteau of their name), controlled from behind the scenes by its founder, honorary chairman and first prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili. A billionaire oligarch who made his money in Russia under Yeltsin’s privatisation schemes, Ivanishvili is now Georgia’s richest man, with a net worth around the quarter of the size of his country’s GDP. Despite not officially being involved in the government, he is widely considered to be the real power behind the throne - even wikipedia’s list of heads of state and government places him as the country’s de-facto leader.
Initially, upon coming to power, Ivanishvili’s party had signalled that, like most of the people, it was pro-western geopolitically and in favour of liberal democracy, but this has not lasted. Over time, he began co-opting the judiciary, cracking down on media independence, and organised opposition. The response in the west amounted to nothing more than raised eyebrows - the impression was still broadly that Georgia was ‘on our side’. After all, the rhetoric coming out of Tbilisi was still positive.
In fact, the illusion was so strong that, following the invasion of Ukraine, I, naively, thought there was a serious chance that Georgia would use the moment of Russian distraction to take back the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This of course did not occur, and there were no serious Georgia-watchers who supported this assertion, but I don’t think it was unjustified given the information the media provided us with. Due to the lack of coverage, there was no reason for us to think that the 2022 Kotsebi weren’t dispositionally the same as all Georgian governments had been since the Rose Revolution: democratic and fiercely anti-Russian - especially after they had been invaded in 2008.
Instead, the anti-western rhetoric then began in earnest. Laws were proposed that attacked the rights of LGBT+ people and ‘foreign agents’, the latter of which, while sounding innocent enough, required all organisations that received more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as groups under foreign influence. This, affecting NGOs and media outlets most seriously, was scarily similar to a law used in Putin’s Russia to increase government control. Protests against these laws were met with violence, including tear gas, water cannons, beatings and mass arrests, and Russian talking points began to be parroted, portraying the west as decadent, destabilising and untrustworthy.
As the 2024 elections grew closer, the war in Ukraine became used as a political weapon: ‘Look at how badly their country has been damaged’, went the message from Georgian Dream. ‘Think about what happened to us in 2008. The west would not help us if we are under threat again.’ The implication was ‘we must appease Russia to save our own skins’. The fearmongering was joined by insane conspiracy theories about a secretive, yet obviously fictitious group called the ‘Global War Party’, which consisted of any number of groups from the European Commission to Swiss Banks, America’s military-industrial complex to internal opposition parties, all apparently working together to profit of wars around the world, promote globalism (at the expense of Georgian sovereignty), and remove Ivanishvili’s party from power.
The elections themselves would have the highest of stakes. Following recent reforms, the President (largely a figurehead, but with some important powers) is no longer chosen by public vote, but by an electoral college, with the number of electors assigned to different political parties based on their percentage scores in the parliamentary election. The president at the time, the popularly elected independent Salome Zurabishvili, originally endorsed by the Kotsebi, had become increasingly alienated by their anti-western stance and was essentially a thorn in their side. A large victory in this election would allow Ivanishvili to pick a president who would not be, and to solidify his control over the country. Furthermore, a three quarters majority in the parliament would allow him to, as he himself said, ban opposition parties entirely.
Predictably, tensions ran high. And it was perhaps even less surprising that the results that came back, a Kotsebi majority, did not match any of the polling conducted by outside observers. Irak’li K’obakhidze (an Ivanishvili stooge) was still the prime minister, and his party had massively overperformed in urban areas outside the capital; similarly some of the rural turnout statistics beggared belief. Aside from the fishiness of the results themselves, there were also reports of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and the buying of votes. There had also been a suspicious delay in the counting process. Campaign financing laws were broadly not followed by Georgian Dream, neither were media coverage rules, and complaints procedures were not followed through properly. That the Central Election Commission was filled with party loyalists didn’t exactly help matters.
The President and the opposition agreed with the majority of outside NGOs and some Governments (including the EU) that the election had been rigged. Zurabishvili refused to accept the results or convene the new parliament: parliament thus (unconstitutionally) convened itself (without the opposition present), and formed a government, and soon an electoral college had selected Mikheil Qavelashvili, a former professional footballer and leader of a political party allied with Georgian Dream, as the new president. Of course, the opposition refused to accept this, as did a significant portion of the population, who continued to protest nightly and hold that Zurabishvili is still president (the only legitimately chosen element of the government). However, this meant little when the institutions of the state, including the army and the police, already captured, acted fully in support of the result. Everything continued according to Ivanishvili’s plan. The authoritarians had secured themselves another term.
A Strategic (and Moral?) Failure?
The Caucasus is often seen as geographically peripheral, a land of high mountains and steep valleys in the far off borderlands between Europe and Asia. This, to me, is a misguided view. Sandwiched between three countries with relatively aggressive and assertive foreign policies, Russia, Iran and Turkey, the region has been fought over for thousands of years - its rugged terrain, both then and now, acts as an effective buffer zone and staging post for attacks into the surrounding flatlands, from the Byzantine-Sassanid wars of the 7th Century to the First World War. This is still true. All three of these powers - especially Moscow and Ankara - confidently see large parts of the Caucasus as part of their sphere, and act accordingly, picking sides constantly over the course of the various modern regional conflicts, and treating countries like Georgia and Armenia as pawns to be manipulated as part of their geopolitical chess game.
Historically, Caucasian states have rarely been left alone, and their destinies have been shaped by the ambitions of larger, more populous empires pressing in on all sides. This has made the peoples within, already divided into comparatively small groups by the complex landscape, fiercely independent politically and culturally. The Georgians are no exception: their Orthodox Christian faith, unique language, alphabet, and cultural traditions (from polyphonic singing to making wine in ‘kvevri’ jars) have all remained intact despite all the odds; their brief historical moment of wider international importance, Georgia’s mediaeval ‘empire’ under Davit IV and Tamar I, is celebrated especially. With this in mind, Caucasian peoples have generally not been easy for outside powers to subjugate.
In the post-Soviet world the Georgian people have sought to assert their own independence by establishing themselves outside the spheres of the neighbouring powers. For decades, Tbilisi had maintained strong westward-leaning aspirations, with popular support for joining both NATO and the EU confirmed by poll after poll. The logic is straightforward: aligning with the west provides protection, development and democratic stability, as well as a seat at the table, in a region where none of those things have been historically guaranteed.
These ambitions have, however, been hindered. Russia has used every tool possible to block its integration into European and Atlantic alliances, including economic pressure, disinformation, and military force. Meanwhile, despite decades of rhetoric, western powers have fallen short of providing Tbilisi with actual, tangible support. Through a mix of not being willing to stand up to Russia to avoid escalation, general ambivalence, and apparently not wanting to touch Georgia’s internal politics with a ten-foot pole (unless of course the pole is really an Azeri gas pipeline), very little has really been achieved. Despite talking a good game, progress has been painfully slow - for instance, the EU agreed to Georgia’s ‘prospective membership’ in 2002, but it only gained candidate status in 2023, which felt like a reluctant concession only granted because of the war in Ukraine. Apparently abandoned, a young population raised on democratic hopes have become increasingly disillusioned. Meanwhile, the Kotsebi have been able to exploit that disillusionment to grow increasingly hostile to the west, limit internal accountability, and pivot towards Putin and authoritarianism.
For me, this has been nothing less than a strategic failure for the west. It should have been a clear-cut case: a country that is statistically pro-western, historically oppressed by Russia, with some strategic significance. By being apathetic, and hesitating to act, Georgia has been left in a vacuum. The problem here is that Vladimir Putin has always known how to exploit vacuums.
An Autopsy for Georgian Democracy
The democratic backsliding in Georgia did not happen overnight, and it wasn’t exactly secret either. It started with biased judges, mild pressure on civil servants, and impartial media, and then escalated into the multiple political crises from 2020 onwards. Bidzina Ivanishvili has never exactly been a subtle man - like Saak’ashvili (president 2004-13) before him, theatre has been a part of his political style, from using his son’s rap music in campaigns to large outdoor rallies. Similarly, he has never really tried to hide how much influence he had, even in the periods where he made a big show of retiring from politics (2013-8, 2021-3). With all this going on, the apathy and neglect coming from the west, responding to the increasing authoritarianism with occasional tepid critiques and the odd frozen asset, has sent a very clear message - ‘we are not that bothered about how democratic Georgia is’. The message is nothing more than a licence.
Obviously, I think this is a foreign policy disaster, and for multiple reasons, but the one I want to draw the most attention to here is its symbolic importance. Letting Georgia fall to one of Putin’s cronies tells other western-minded states around the world that there is no hope in trying to become more democratic if you aren't in an area of the world under the media spotlight, your democratic commitment will not be protected or rewarded. Furthermore, we must ask what message it sends to powers like Russia, who want to expand at the expense of the west. If a Putin-aligned populist can be entrenched in Tbilisi with little real consequences, what's to stop China or Iran from feeling like they can try something similar? With regards to Georgia, I fear that (without drastic action) time has already run out. As every day goes on the protestors become more disillusioned, the Kotsebi cement their control and international legitimacy, and whatever legitimacy and pressure the west could have exerted rapidly disappears.
The blame can be thrown in many directions. Politicians and policy makers should be acting far more directly, forcefully and purposely. Merely saying that the elections were probably rigged but then not imposing wide ranging sanctions, making strong statements, providing local opposition groups and media with actual tangible support, and bringing Georgia to the fore in conversations about foreign policy and the state of world democracy does not do anything at all.
The kind of public outrage that this story should generate sadly doesn’t exist. Your average western citizen doesn’t know what or where Georgia even is, let alone anything about its politics. This is, in my opinion, a problem with our media landscape, within which stories like this one fall by the wayside as what matters depends on what they think will get the most clicks or will fit most neatly into pre-existing narratives. Complicated, slow-burn, democratic crises in regions most people know very little about are ignored in favour of the more familiar and dramatic, even when they are no less important. The role of the media should be to educate and inform people about what is happening in the world, not just to drum up as many clicks as possible. Silence, in this context, is negligent. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s complicity, but I’m not sure it's far off.
At this moment, engaged in a global war against populism and autocracy, more than ever, liberal western powers should be fighting wherever they can. In this war, Georgia is not a sideshow, a distant borderland well within other spheres; It is a proudly independent country whose people have chosen democracy, again and again over the last thirty years, only to receive hardship, corruption, Russian influence and broken western promises. By ignoring their struggle, we fail the people and the principles we claim to stand for. If we never hear about Georgia, it's almost impossible to think about and care about Georgia. If we don’t care, then there is little incentive for those in power to either.
It is not right to allow something as important as democracy to be dismantled with nothing more than a quiet shrug and a blank space in the headlines.
Recommended Resources
On the 2024 Election:
Seskuria - ‘Georgia’s Contested Election - What’s Next?
A response to the results from about two weeks after. Outlines the stakes and context well.
The ODIHR Report into the Election
A very detailed analysis of how the election really played out - the introduction is a good overview.
On Georgian Politics Pre-Georgian Dream :
Naysmith - ‘Georgia In the Mountains of Poetry’
A book-length overview of the context leading up to modern events - the final chapter, an interview with Ivanishvili is really interesting - precisely because of how little it meshes with what we know now.
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